Yep. That’s exactly what a 1st century Palestinian jew would look like. NOT. Who the fuck do these mushwits think Yeshua bar Joseph/YHWH was? I bug the few religiturds I can tolerate with this question all the time. They get all butthurt and snivelly, but I never get anything resembling an answer.

And I’m not sure the fussing about Jesus’ teeth is fair. He was in his 20s when he went preaching and probably didn’t eat a high sugar diet. With good genetic luck (and surely having god as your literal father must give you reasonable genes), he should have good teeth still at that age.

OTOH, he sure looks clean for an itinerant preacher in the bronze age. And how does he keep his skin from burning with that complexion?

White Jesus – is there any other flavor? I mean, come on! Everyone knows that Adam and Eve were white, and that darker skin is the mark of Cain as punishment for killing his bro, and that you can tell how righteous a given population is based upon the color of their skin, and that if you do well in this life and are able to ascend to the highest level of Heaven you’ll be as lily-white as it is possible to be. With blue eyes.

Surely this all stems from basic North American culture, i.e. cowboy films. In the same way as everybody who doesn’t like something just shoots it, the goodies all wear white hats and the baddies wear black ones.

They at the History Channel think “whatever sells America.” Apparently it’s working because the show is getting huge ratings. I think (FWIW) the Jesus character is mostly, if not entirely, myth, and in either case you’ll never deduce fact from fiction without considerable speculation because the only evidence we have is the story.

Not that I am a big fan of whitewashing Jesus so that white conservatives may not feel icky about having someone who probably looked like Yasser Arafat as a role model but…

Fair skinned middle-easterners do exist, you know. And I remember people jumping at me when I showed this picture, going all “They’re is NO WAY an Arab can look this white: fakefakefakefakeFAKEFAKEFAKEFAKEFAKEFAKE“

IIRC when it comes to sugar the amount doesn’t matter as much as long long it stays in your mouth. Nursing a sucker for an hour would do more damage than wolfing down a banana split if you followed it by rinsing out your mouth. The bacteria doesn’t have as much time to feed and cause tooth decay. They did have sweet baked goods in those days and not much idea about good dental hygine.

That’s not just racist, it’s shit casting. They seriously couldn’t find someone to play Jesus that didn’t look like a pot-head high school dropout? This is supposed to be Christ, King of the Jews: he looks like he works at a gas station at an incapacitating level of highness.

Not that I am a big fan of whitewashing Jesus so that white conservatives may not feel icky about having someone who probably looked like Yasser Arafat as a role model but…

For that matter, Arafat isn’t that dark himself. He’s a lot paler than most of the Arabs I’ve known personally, at least.

I wonder if some people aren’t overestimating how dark Jesus (or “a randomly selected 1st-centuary Palestinian Jew”) would have been. Given the amount of invasions, migrations, slave-trading, etc that has happened in that part of the world, there must be a very diverse gene-pool there.

#49
That would be assuming the people of different nations mixed. Even with the invasions, etc I don’t think someone that white would have resulted. What you describe sounds like that part in Mythbusters when they say, “OK we’re going to give this story the best possible chance of success and assume all the conditions are optimal. Now let’s see if a busted gas main can cause an explosion big enough to send a car over the roof.”

..still, we always cut our hair because otherwise you had to tie it up or something else ridiculous. You point out a glaring hole in my perceptions of surfers though, in that I always went out to surf with MALE surfers.

..and in a final note, it was likely a response based on the fact that the picture of Jesus there is indeed a male with really long hair, which is a rare thing amongst males in surfing from my experience, and was intended as a reaction to the stereotype of surfers as “long haired hippies”.

IOW… looking at that picture of Jesus, the LAST thing that would pop into my head is thinking he should be at Malibu surfing!

Does anyone know of a film or television show that has accurately portrayed Jesus? I would love to see the reaction to that.

This show is airing on History Canada as well and I have tried to stay far away from it. The few minutes I have seen have been pretty painful. For the most part the programs they air are terrible these days. When I am feeling pretty mindless I toss up my heels and perhaps leave Pawn Stars playing (sometimes I do see something interesting and my internet searches on that topic can actually be educational). For the most part the only interesting programs are the Canadian productions such as War Story or Air Aces and I largely ignore the rest.

Does anyone know of a film or television show that has accurately portrayed Jesus? — Travis #65

Considering that there are exactly ZERO contemporary portraits of him, that would be a big fat “hell naw”!

Well, I take it back. He probably had hair; at least one finger on one hand at the end of one arm; a pelvis (in order to ride the ass); lips, tongue and (some) teeth, so any film or TV show that included those features is about as accurate as you could expect. Unless he didn’t exist.

the question is unanswerable on the face of it, considering it’s still not clear that the man described in the various texts even existed.

I guess I should have been more clear. When I said historical accurate I mean more of a Jesus being portrayed in a manner that meshes up with biblical content, without leaving out inconvenient parts, as well as heavily leaning on our historical knowledge to portray the character properly within the context of the time and place, whether he was fictional or not.A portrayal that has more to do with our knowledge of the time as opposed to the biases many people have, such as those involved in the creation of this film. For example, I was thinking of something that looks at the work of a person like Phil Harland and his podcast series The Historical Jesus in Context to understand what the historical Jesus might have been like if he existed. I have a feeling that a Jesus character portrayed in this manner would disturb many Christians.

@74: While that is technically true, it’s still conveniently ignoring the racist rationale behind choosing this specific kind of portrayal of Jesus over others. After all, if the lack of evidence for Jesus means he could look like anyone, why not make him Chinese?

I find most of the conversation here, including the OP, more annoying/disturbing/choose fitting adjective than Jesus’s looks in the series. “No way a (first century) levantine would have looked like that! That’s totally a “white european dude!” Okey dokey, nothing we haven’t seen on eurocentric sites before, I guess. Now, let’s speculate: was it a settled Celt that made you look like this or a Crusader?

These depictions of Jeebus stem from the Byzantine iconophiles. Jeebus was depicted in two (contradictory) ways. The first way was as “young jeebus”, in which he was depicted as the ideal of youthful masculine beauty in the form of a curly headed Arab boy. Post-puberty, “older jeebus” was depicted in the most beautiful ideal for a young adult man – which at the time was a castrated blond slave of Northern European extraction.

Whoever doesn’t even realize the Crusaders were well over a thousand years after jesus’s alleged death. They couldn’t have contributed to his ancenstry. Jesus was long dead and, among other reasons, they were trying to spread xianity.

The magic book says that jesus was a descendant of the House of David and Jewish.

I’ll rephrase since I guess I bungled that up: the talk about Jesus looking like a “white european dude” doesn’t seem to take into account what Levantines can actually look like today and could have looked like at that time, as well (for example, when I first saw this guy “surfer guy in California wasn’t what entered my mind at all). It reminded me a bit of other (actually, what seems like a majority) fora where Americans and Europeans have some preconceived notion of what people in a certain area “should” look like and any deviation from that look is “interesting” and “strange” (and obviously the result of this one historical event one learnt of in school). I realize the intentions and views here are different but it was still a bit uncomfortable.

Whoever doesn’t even realize the Crusaders were well over a thousand years after jesus’s alleged death.

Poor wording in my original post but that wasn’t in reference to the 1st century or to Jesus, obviously.

@theophontes
Interesting information. IIRC it’s not in Herrin so where does one go for more? :-) The latter reminds me of some early “good shepherd” depictions of Jesus.

I have no love for Mel Gibson, but he made an effort to get things like language authentic.

-If they want this stuff to be pop culture, why not give Satan a red jedi sword and enliven the narrative with a duel between Satan and Jesus?
The aliens that made a cameo appearence in “Life of Brian” would also be welcome. Suggestion: Their spaceship rescues Jesus and his parents from king Herod’s soldiers, after which Josef and Mary spend a couple of years peacefully raising Jesus at Easter Island…or Nazca. Before the family returns to Nazareth, the young Jesus travels widely, fighting evil wizards and dragons. During one of his quests, he learns who his true father is, which has a profound effect on his ambitions.